Renaissance Jewellery

Renaissance jewels are among the most alluring manifestations of an age that experienced the widening of horizons, from the Old World to the New. This volume overflows with luxurious imagery expressing the boundless creativity and spirit of the Age of the Renaissance. Yvonne Hackenbroch relates the tales of the jewels, the artists, and the patrons who commissioned them.

Superb sourcebook of rare ornamentation includes meticulously detailed narrative and 400 illustrations depicting priceless brooches, necklaces, clasps, gold padlock, reliquary pendants, much more.

The study of medieval clothing and textiles reveals much about the history of our material culture, as well as social, economic and cultural history as a whole. This book makes use of archaeological finds and text references in order to examine this history, providing on overview of historic fashions.

This illustrated study of Renaissance Nuremberg explores the city’s social and artistic history through the sixteenth century and beyond. The German city of Nuremberg reached the height of its artistic brilliance during the Renaissance, becoming one of the foremost cultural centers in all of Europe by 1500. Nuremberg was the home of painter Albrecht Dürer, whose creative genius inspired generations of German artists. However, Dürer was only one of a host of extraordinary painters, printmakers, sculptors, and goldsmiths working in the city. Following a map of the city’s principal landmarks, Guy Fitch Lytle provides a compact historical background for Jeffrey Chipps Smith's detailed discussions of the city’s social and artistic significance. Smith examines the religious function of art before and during the Reformation; the early manifestations of humanism in Nuremberg and its influence on the art of Dürer and his contemporaries; and the central role of Dürer’s pedagogical ideas and his workshop in the dissemination of Renaissance artistic concepts. Finally, Smith surveys the principal artists and stylistic trends in Nuremberg from 1500 to the outbreak of the Thirty Years War. Nuremberg: A Renaissance City, 1500-1618 contains biographical sketches of forty-five major artists of the period, plus more than three hundred illustrations depicting the city and its most magnificent artistic treasures.

You are what you own. So believed many of the elite men and women of Renaissance Italy. The notion that a person's belongings transmit something about their personal history, status, and "character" was renewed in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Objects of Virtue explores the multiple meanings and values of the objects with which families like the Medici, Este, and Gonzaga surrounded themselves. This lavishly illustrated volume examines the complicated relationships between the so-called "fine arts"--painting and sculpture--and artifacts of other kinds for which artistry might be as important as utility-furniture, jewelry, and vessels made of gold, silver, and bronze, precious and semi-precious stone, glass, and ceramic. The works discussed were designed and made by artists as famous as Andrea Mantegna, Raphael, and Michelangelo, as well as by lesser-known specialists--goldsmiths, gem-engravers, glassmakers, and maiolica painters.